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It has been exactly seven years since Steve Jobs unveiled the iPhone on stage in front of the audience, the mobile phone that changed the entire industry and started the smartphone revolution. Competitors reacted differently to the newly introduced phone, but it was their reaction and speed of response that determined their future for years to come. Steve Ballmer laughed off the iPhone and touted his strategy with Windows Mobile. Two years later, the whole system was cut and with the current Windows Phone 8, it has a share of a few percent.

At first, Nokia completely ignored the iPhone and tried to continue to push its Symbian and later its touch-friendly version. The stock eventually plummeted, the company adapted Windows Phone, and eventually sold its entire mobile division to Microsoft for a fraction of what it once cost. Blackberry was able to respond adequately only at the beginning of last year, and the company is currently on the verge of bankruptcy and does not really know what to do with itself. Palm reacted quite briskly and managed to bring WebOS, which is still praised to this day, and with it the Palm Pré phone, however, as a result of American operators and problems with component suppliers, the company was eventually sold to HP, which buried the entire WebOS, and the system now recalls its former potential only on smart TV screens LG.

Google was able to react the fastest with its Android operating system, which arrived in the form of the T-Mobile G1/HTC Dream less than a year and a half after the iPhone went on sale. However, it was a long way to the form of Android, which Google officially presented at the time, and thanks to the book Dogfight: How Apple and Google Went to War and Started a Revolution we can also learn something behind the scenes.

In 2005, the situation surrounding mobile phones and operators was significantly different. The oligopoly of a few companies controlling cellular networks dictated the entire market, and phones were created practically only on the orders of operators. They controlled not only aspects of the hardware but also the software and provided their services only on their sandbox. Trying to develop any software was more or less a waste of money because there was no standard between phones. Only Symbian had several mutually incompatible versions.

At that time, Google wanted to push its search into mobile phones, and to achieve this, it had to communicate everything through operators. However, the operators preferred the ringtones they sold themselves in the search, and the results from Google were displayed only in the last places. In addition, the Mountain View company faced another threat, and that was Microsoft.

Its Windows CE, then known as Windows Mobile, were becoming quite popular (although historically their share was always below 10 percent), and Microsoft also at that time began to promote its own search service, which later transformed into today's Bing. Google and Microsoft were already rivals back then, and if, with the growing popularity of Microsoft, they pushed their search at Google's expense and didn't even offer it as an option, there would be a real risk that the company would slowly lose its only source of money at the time, which came from ads in search results . At least that's what Google officials thought. Similarly, Microsoft completely killed Netscape with Internet Explorer.

Google knew that to survive in the mobile era, it would need more than just integrating its search and app to access its services. That's why in 2005 he bought the Android software startup founded by former Apple employee Andy Rubin. Rubin's plan was to create an open-source mobile operating system that any hardware manufacturer could implement for free on their devices, unlike the licensed Windows CE. Google liked this vision and after the acquisition appointed Rubin as head of development of the operating system, whose name it kept.

Android was supposed to be revolutionary in many ways, in some aspects more revolutionary than the iPhone that Apple later introduced. It had the integration of popular Google web services including maps and YouTube, could have multiple applications open at the same time, had a full-fledged internet browser and was supposed to include a centralized store with mobile applications.

However, the hardware form of Android phones at the time was supposed to be completely different. The most popular smartphones at the time were BlackBerry devices, following their example, the first Android prototype, codenamed Sooner, had a hardware keyboard and a non-touch display.

On January 9, 2007, Andy Rubin was on his way to Las Vegas by car to meet with hardware manufacturers and carriers. It was during the trip that Steve Jobs revealed his ticket to the mobile phone market, which later made Apple the most valuable company in the world. Rubin was so impressed by the performance that he stopped the car to watch the rest of the broadcast. That's when he said to his colleagues in the car: "Shit, we're probably not going to launch this [Sooner] phone."

Even though Android was in some ways more advanced than the first iPhone, Rubin knew he would have to rethink the whole concept. With Android, it gambled on what users loved about BlackBerry phones—the combination of a great hardware keyboard, email, and a solid phone. But Apple has completely changed the rules of the game. Instead of a hardware keyboard, he offered a virtual one, which, although not nearly as accurate and fast, did not occupy half of the display all the time. Thanks to the all-touch interface with a single hardware button on the front below the display, each application could have its own controls as needed. Moreover, Sooner was ugly since the wonderful iPhone, which was supposed to be compensated by the revolutionary Android.

This was something Rubin and his team considered risky at the time. Due to major changes in the concept, the Sooner was canceled and a prototype codenamed Dream, which had a touch screen, came to the fore. The introduction was thus postponed until the fall of 2008. During its development, Google engineers focused on everything that the iPhone could not do to differentiate the Dream sufficiently. After all, for example, the absence of a hardware keyboard was still considered a shortcoming, which is why the first Android phone ever, the T-Mobile G1, also known as the HTC Dream, had a slide-out section with typing keys and a small scroll wheel.

After the introduction of the iPhone, time stood still at Google. The most secretive and ambitious project at Google, on which many had spent 60-80 hours a week for more than two years, was obsolete that morning. Six months of work with prototypes, which should have resulted in the final product presented at the end of 2007, went to waste, and the entire development was postponed by another year. Rubin associate Chris DeSalvo commented, “As a consumer, I was blown away. But as a Google engineer, I thought we'd have to start over."

While the iPhone was arguably Steve Jobs' greatest triumph, lifting Apple above all other companies and today still accounting for more than 50 percent of all revenue in Infinity Loop 1, it was a blow to the ribs for Google—at least its Android division.

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